Inhaltsangabe

From Dagger Award-winning and internationally best-selling author Alan Bradley comes this utterly beguiling mystery, starring one of fiction’s most remarkable sleuths: Flavia de Luce, a dangerously brilliant 11-year-old with a passion for chemistry and a genius for solving murders. This time, Flavia finds herself untangling two deaths—separated by time but linked by the unlikeliest of threads.

Flavia thinks that her days of crime-solving in the bucolic English hamlet of Bishop’s Lacy are over—and then Rupert Porson has an unfortunate rendezvous with electricity. The beloved puppeteer has had his own strings sizzled, but who’d do such a thing and why? For Flavia, the questions are intriguing enough to make her put aside her chemistry experiments and schemes of vengeance against her insufferable big sisters. Astride Gladys, her trusty bicycle, Flavia sets out from the de Luces’ crumbling family mansion in search of Bishop’s Lacey’s deadliest secrets.

Does the madwoman who lives in Gibbet Wood know more than she’s letting on? What of the vicar’s odd ministrations to the catatonic woman in the dovecote? Then there’s a German pilot obsessed with the Brontë sisters, a reproachful spinster aunt, and even a box of poisoned chocolates. Most troubling of all is Porson’s assistant, the charming but erratic Nialla. All clues point toward a suspicious death years earlier and a case the local constables can’t solve—without Flavia’s help. But in getting so close to who’s secretly pulling the strings of this dance of death, has our precocious heroine finally gotten in way over her head?

Flavia de Luce is pure delight and she is stealing her way into your heart effortlessly. After having read “The Sweetness at the Bottom of the Pie” it is fun to be back in Bishop’s Lacey. Of course little Flavia de Luce is way too smart for an eleven year old and parts of the story and some of the coincidences are a little bit construed, but so what. Flavia’s common sense and chemical wizardry, her youthfulness and relentless curiosity are refreshing and make you feel good.

In this episode Flavia has to solve the mysterious death of Rupert Porson, a puppeteer, who got stranded in Bishop’s Lacey together with his charming female assistant. But as Flavia finds out soon, there are deeply hidden secrets, which link the puppeteer to a murder of a young boy a couple of years ago. Of course, nothing remains hidden from Flavia de Luce and she will unravel these mysteries long before the police has a chance to do that.